Doug Argue

Biography

Known for using thousands of individual letters to create immersive large-scale paintings, Doug Argue works from the idea that “letters, like atoms and chromosomes, are basic building blocks that can be taken apart and constructed in new ways.” His imagery is granular, evoking primordial evolution and celestial matter, as in Genesis (2007), where a deep central vanishing point gives the impression of warping through outer space, a dynamism “meant to be physically experienced.” Describing the process behind the work, Argue said: “I took letters from the book of Genesis and after distorting them in Photoshop, put them back together into a big bang. The shifting cosmologies of time past and time present filled with myth and reality feels a bit like the world I live in.”